6 - Week 1: New Kid on the Block 4ieme - Geneve

 Thursday, February 27

Don't forget to stop and smell the roses, but leave the purple flowers alone if they're on fenced-in property.

Oh, boy, what a day 😂 I've got three highlights.  First, at work, I got invited by my boss' boss for a 1 on 1 meeting to touch base about my arrival and stay.  Since he's the one who's sponsoring my trip, it was nice discuss with him and get a better feel of his expectations.  As far as expectations, I think my earlier impressions were correct: my stay is what I make of it.  We have a few projects for me to work on as reasons to get out and interact with people so I get a feel for cultural/office differences.  He also raised a point about thinking about company/location strengths/weaknesses and how we need to focus on exploiting strengths to stay competitive; it's adapt or die.  Oh, and his office has a great view right along the Rhone river - simply sublime.

An ode to my office window: when it's nice I can open it two different ways and the blinds are very adjustable too.  If sun's not an issue, then the view is still pretty good anyhow.

Ok, number two: I got invited to a process safety chemistry training, it was primarily organized for some of the young, new lab techs and chemists but a few of us engineers were invited to tag along.  It was a nice blast from the past covering some topics and formulas I hadn't seen since university plus a few I'd been exposed to at work but it was interesting to hear them explained in French.  For example, the difference between something being very flammable vs explosive being related to its ability to self-accelerate primary and secondary decompositions and various concepts around temperature and time.  It was all wrapped up with an impressive capstone exercise involving everyone putting on safety glasses and amount of a substance in a small mortar dish.  

A victim volunteer was obtained and given gloves, a lighter (briquette), and a ceramic pestle.  First, the dish was ignited with the lighter, giving off a short little burst of flame.  Then, the dish was reloaded with just a smidge of the powder again and the volunteer put on hearing protection.  This time, the pestle was used to grind the powder and provide heat from friction: the first grind didn't do anything, the 2nd turn of the pestle resulted in a *BANG* that obliterated the mortar dish and cleft the pestle in twain.  Bits of ceramic were found as far as 6m away... Having spent 10 years in this industry, I've always feared incidents involving flammables and the idea of an explosion; but this demonstration with less than a gram of material made me fear explosive conditions.  Oh, don't worry, everyone was fine and the volunteer kept his shattered pestle as a trophy.  

I'm glad I was wearing my safety glasses, it all happened faster than I could register.  The only thing missing was the volunteer quickly caching his hand inside a long sleeve and whip out the squeeze bottle of ketchup.  

 

And final stop: my boss had put me in contact with a friend of his working at a different site in La Plaine.  The guy had worked at my site in New Jersey for a few years and has been in Geneva for 17 years; he invited me to have dinner with him and his wife, which was a vraiment sympa gesture.  I happily took him up on his offer and we found each other on the train commute to the main station.  It was awesome to get to know them better and I feel like the conversation with these two immigrants (they said they're well past the point of simply being expats) on my first week was the perfect way to set up the framing for the rest of my visit.  

We swapped backgrounds and stories, had some laughs, shook our heads at current politics (he and I are doing our best to be ostriches regarding the US at the moment), and enjoyed a great Lebanese meal together.  Potentially most important, I gained a lot of observations from their time in Geneva regarding Swiss culture and the system.  I won't spell out what was said, but can lay out a few highlights:

• Geneva has a fairly small permanent population (~200k) due to housing costs but boasts impressive services and activities.
• Thursdays are the big day of the week: stores and things stay open a few hours later and markets set up in various parts of town.  Both Thursday & Friday feature discounts by restaurants (reserve via La Forchette) to attract customers in light of commuters potentially clearing out for the weekend.
• If purchased well ahead of time, a Switzerland-wide transport pass can be purchased for reasonable prices.
• Taxe rates are lower than I'd thought they'd be in  Switzerland but health insurance was turned over to the private sector a while back.  
• School starts at age 6 and goes to 19, students need to make a decision about their future path at 14 regarding university or trade school.  Grade and exam requirements are part of this.
• Some of the roads around Geneva are paved with recycled rubber instead of simply asphalt, resulting in quieter roads at the expense of requiring more frequent replacement.
• Apparently my neighborhood/village of Carouge is a know pickpocket hotspot (I didn't get the feel but maybe the pickpockets are on vacation this week, it's school's winter break this week).
• The US legislation put in place to route (wink wink nudge nudge) Swiss bank accounts makes it nearly impossible for American expats to obtain (above board) Swiss accounts.  
• Swiss residents have assigned bunkers and the national reserve can call on some 600k people, each sent home with a rifle after training but no ammunition.

Suffice to say they had both positive and negative things to say in comparison to other countries they've lived in.  Much of what they said lines up with other discussions I've had with non-Swiss coworkers; I'll have to try spending a bit more time with the Swiss engineers to help complete the picture.  Thus far, my conclusion is that the Swiss government works effectively and efficiently in its own way, like a finely tuned machine; but if you reach across the machine in a way not accounted/designed for or stand in the wrong spot, don't be surprised if you get pinched or a lose a finger.  This system is effective but very rigid, for better or worse. 

Bonus lightning round: for those who may not know, French français has an interesting counting method.

• 1 - 10 is straight forward (one, two, three, etc.)
• 11 - 16 have reasonable equivalents (eleven, twelve, etc.)
• 17 - 19 is where things start to get funky (ten seven, ten eight, ten nine)
• 20 - 69 follow a logical progression (twenty, twenty one, sixty nine)
• 70 - 79 is when we go off the rails (sixty ten, sixty eleven, sixty ten seven, etc)
• 80 - 99 is just bonkers (fourtwenty, fourtwenty five, fourtwenty eleven, fourtwenty ten nine)
• 100 resets the cycle.

Well, turns out not all of the francophone world agrees this is an ideal way to count.  My Swiss colleagues say seventy (septante), eighty (huitante), and ninety (nonante).  But don't you dare say octante: apparently only the French say that when they want to make a dig at the Swiss-French 😂